Murder is Everywhere

Salgado

2012-02-13T00:01:00.002-05:00

Today, I’m going to take a page out of Cara and Jeff’s book and exchange photographs for words.

All of the images below were shot by one man, probably the greatest photographer the early twenty-first century has produced.

And all were shot in black-and-white, the medium he prefers.

This is the man:

Sebastião Salgado trained to be an economist, took a master’s degree at the University of São Paulo and worked for the International Coffee Organization. Then, at the age of 29, he decided to transform his hobby into his profession and struck out on his own as a photographer.

In the course of the last forty years, Salgado has travelled all over the world making photographs.

Sometimes of nature.

But mostly of people.

Capturing them from the rivers of the Mato Grosso…

…to the tea plantations of Rwanda.

And from the gold fields of Pará…

…to the oil fields of Iraq.

Some shots could only be called beautiful.

But others...

...many others...

sear the soul.

Probably his most famous quote: “It’s not the photographer who makes the picture. It’s the person being photographed.”

These days, Salgado works on self-assigned, long-term projects - and publishes them in book form.

His books aren't cheap:

http://amzn.to/AqqfA3

But, believe me, they’re worth every centavo.

Leighton - Monday

Mr. Coffee

2012-02-12T00:42:00.000-05:00

Honoré de Balzac, after a couple of espressos,

checking for palpitations

"When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days."

We all know that writers are coffee hounds. But the grandpére of them all was Honoré de Balzac, whose two-fisted approach to the Drink of the Gods is quoted above.

Given his prodigious output, it's not surprising that Balzac relied on stimulants. His magnum opus, The Human Comedy, comprises more than ninety novels, novellas, and stories totaling millions of words and featuring hundreds of major characters and thousands of one- or two-scene walk-ons. There is literally nothing like it in the world; the works are layered over one another, the heroes or heroines of one subordinate (or just glimpsed) in another, the characters rising and falling through all the levels of society, from the fields and huddled houses of small provincial towns to the palaces and grand hôtels of Paris.

The Comedy is studded with individual masterpieces: Pére Goriot (a variation on "King Lear"), Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, A Harlot High and Low, Cousin Bette, and others, short and long. Many of them were published in installments, as he wrote them, meaning that he was pantsing on a grand scale, making it up as he went along, absolutely stuck with what he had already written. And, of course, "The Human Comedy" itself, written over a remarkably short span of 14 or 15 years, was perhaps literature's supreme feat of pantsing. He did it all, writing session after writing session, by the seat of his pants.

And on coffee. Lots of coffee.

Balzac's entire life was arranged to accommodate his writing and his coffee. He ate dinner in the afternoon and went to bed around 6 PM. At midnight he was up and knocking back the first in an unending bucket brigade of cups of strong black coffee. He wrote through the night and into the following day, sometimes straight through the following day, without going back to bed. Pounding that caffeine, he occasionally worked for 48 hours uninterrupted, conducting the imaginary orchestra of Paris.

He wrote (probably after a couple of cups) about how it affected him: "Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink -- for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder."

This is a serious jones. But I have to say I'd take coffee intravenously if it would allow me to write like Balzac. I'd snort instant. Problem is, for coffee to help you write like Balzac, first you have to be Balzac.

Or maybe I could find a new grind.

Tim - Sundays

A Bit of Inspiration, Make that Two Bits.

2012-02-11T00:05:00.047-05:00

These days, searching the news for anything positive about Greece makes me appreciate the position of social director on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg: it’s all about the crisis, stupid.

But if you look hard enough, you’ll find what assures us who know and love Greece that no matter what happens in that tortured/torturing bit of central Athens known as Parliament, Hellas will survive.

This week I found my inspiration through the Greece-Ellada Facebook page of my Mykonian friend, Milka Milada Piccini.

Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou

It was an aerial video tour high above some of Greece’s most beautiful and enduring landscapes. I’ve seen longer versions of the film before, some with subtitles and a guidebook soundtrack, others set to the music of Vangelis. You don’t know Vangelis? Think Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner and of one of the greatest composers of electronic music of all time.

But this is the best one I’ve found at capturing in fifteen minutes the essence of what is Greece. Done in high definition video and set to largely traditional music, it briefly touches upon the environs of Athens, then drifts out to sea and on to Mykonos and Delos before soaring on to other islands (mostly Cycladic) and mainland sites, passing over Macedonia, Mount Athos, Meteora, Delphi, Olympia, and so many others. Here it is:

By the time it’s over I promise you will be at peace. To remain that way, I suggest you stay away from all news for as long as you can stand.

I have one more inspirational site/sight for your consideration. It’s a photograph I took three days ago from the same window in my New York City office as I watched the World Trade Center Twin Towers crumble on 9/11.

Centered in the photo is the new One World Trade Center on its way to reclaiming a dominant position in Manhattan's skyline. Ninety floors up, fourteen more to go.

God Bless America. God Bless Greece.

Jeff—Saturday

Not a Joke

2012-02-10T08:34:00.000-05:00

I've written here before about how fond I am of Twitter. Not everyone shares my liking for it, which is fine with me. I think I've also mentioned a friend who seethes at the very mention of it. 'It's just egomaniacs passing on pointless observations of life, as if we should care,' he says. 'Or cracking terrible jokes. It's trivial and inane.'

He often has a point. But this week Twitter became slightly less trivial. A case that began with a lame joke on Twitter in January 2010 wound up in front of two senior judges at the High Court.

To give the background. A trainee accountant named Paul Chambers noticed that Robin Hood airport had been closed because of snow. He was due to fly out to meet his girlfriend in Northern Ireland (who, apparently, he met via Twitter.) So he tweeted: 'Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!'

I know. Hardly funny. Or subtle. But comments and reactions like these are ten-a-penny on Twitter. I doubt anyone following him, or seeing the comment, took it seriously.

Except for the police. A week later he was arrested by five police officers, had his computer and mobile phone seized, interrogated for eight hours and eventually charged with causing a menace under the Communications Act of 2003. A bit extreme you might think. After all most bombers don't announce their intentions in detail a week and a half in advance and give their name. But the police no doubt felt they should investigate. Once they realised it was a poor gag, it ended there, surely?

No. The case was sent to Magistrates Court in Doncaster where Chambers was, um, convicted of causing a menace. Understandably, not wanting this on his record, Chambers appealed and it was sent to Doncaster Crown Court where sanity prevailed. Or you would have hoped it would. It didn't. The judge upheld the conviction and said: "Anyone in this country in the present climate of terrorist threats, especially at airports, could not be unaware of the possible consequences. The message is menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed."

It was difficult to work out who was joking now. Chambers was meanwhile left £3000 out of pocket in legal fees. He was tempted to let it lie until a ragtag group of lawyers, comedians, and ordinary Twitter users an, troubled by what this meant, came together to raise money and offer their services in Chambers defence. The result was this week's High Court appearance, when one hopes sanity will be restored. Don't hold your breath though. The QC defending the judgement said, with a straight face: "The message was posted at a time when the potential threat to airport security was high. It was capable of being read by members of the airport staff and members of the public as a threat to airport safety and public safety."

If I worked at Robin Hood airport - and before this case I didn't even know there was a Robin Hood airport and I used to live relatively nearby - I'd be consulting my lawyers for being made to look dumber than a box of frogs in court.

Judgement was reserved. Everyone now waits to see whether making a poor joke in questionable taste is a criminal offence. As one of Chambers' supporters, comedy writer Graham Linehan, said: "If we were all to be convicted because of bad jokes we'd be in terrible trouble."

cheers

Dan - Friday

Miscellaneous and then some

2012-02-08T17:53:00.001-05:00

Sometimes I wonder how long it will take humans to introduce some of the technology available in most computer‘s to our heads. Just now I really needed to do a search in my brain that could have used a „find“ option or even google. Somewhere within my skull is the last name of an old friend who‘s first name is too common for me to find her in the phone book – which incidentally is organized by first name here. The internet proved useless in locating her but I know the information is hidden away somewhere in my brain. I could also use a rewind button, pause and undo. And a spellchecker. Not to mention built in reading lenses that would slide down from underneath my eyelids when the indents on the side of my head were pressed.

I am not often the receiver of threats from those in authority. This probably has to do with becoming older and behaving better as years add one to the other. But the other day, standing in line at the immigration at Orlando airport I did receive a threat from a very angry immigration/police official sporting a gun in a holster. My wrongdoing? Answering my cell phone when it rang and not having noticed signs forbidding the use of phones when in line. Why I do not know. It is not as if Bin Laden is taking any calls lately. Three hundred years in the future this would not have happened at all as I would have been able to press the sides of my head, enabling me to read the signs when passing them. Or able to press undo. But I know better than to try and make excuses and anyway the man did not seem like he wanted to hear about my ideas for bettering life with technology. So I stood through a lecture of the yelling kind which ended with a threat that had I not been smoke free for nine hours would have made me laugh, it was so ridiculous. It involved him evoking his power to move me to the very end of the line. Not exactly terrible stuff when you are standing next to last in this same line. Even the children in our group were unimpressed – despite the gun.

One thing regarding technology that did make me happy on my trip and that was the signs advertising the coming of 4G phones. My glee had nothing to do with me wanting a 4G phone. I was just happy that this means I can stop feeling bad about not knowing what a 3G phone has to offer. My time was not wasted trying to obtain this soon to be obsolete information.

I have now written the first paragraph of my new book. It is the seventh book in the Thóra series, my eight novel for grownups and my thirteenth novel in all when the pre-teen books are added to the mix. At the back of my mind buzzes a worry. Aren‘t the numbers seven and thirteen unlucky? Thankfully eight is my favorite number from childhood and hopefully potent enough to counterbalance the other two.

Finally, to end this erratic post on an even-more-so note – does anyone know why there is a general tendency to find odd numbers less likeable than even numbers?

Yrsa - Wednesday

Of all the Gaul!

2012-02-07T07:23:00.000-05:00

Of All the Gaul!
France has been in the news a great deal of late and it's le grand froid now -really cold all over Europe so depending where you live you might be inside reading or possibly looking for books that are French mysteries--Here's a little list of my favorites - a wide variety of intriguing tales, all but the first of which were either written in English or have been translated:

L'ombre Chinoise (The Chinese Shadow), by Georges Simenon (1963). This Inspector Maigret book (available only in French unless you can find an old translation) is set in Paris in the quartier of the Marais and centered in Place des Vosges, where Simenon lived for a time. It's one of my favorites. Any of the Maigret books are a "must," especially since this year marks the 100th anniversary year of his birth. His psychological insights into human nature cannot be beat. Happy birthday, Georges!

Death from the Woods, by Brigitte Aubert (2001). A mesmerizing thriller centered around a blind, mute quadriplegic. You won't be able to put it down--I couldn't. I read it one night and, yes, its an engrossing puzzle, too. Aubert won the Grand Prix de Littérature policière for Welcome Rain.

Death in the Dordogne, by Louis Sanders (2002). Rural France as seen by an expat Brit, who discovers murder, mayhem and the charms of French women who smoke, drink, drive and look wonderful doing it. Sanders sees his fellow countryfolk with a laser wit and a self-deprecating English flavor. He draws searing portraits of old villagers still impacted by the Occupation.

Mission to Marseilles, by Leo Malet (1991). Features the adventures of private detective Nestor Burma. This book finds Burma in wartime, France caught between some villains and the Gestapo. He is soon heading for the unoccupied zone, where he discovers the secret of the mysterious Formula 5. I love Leo Malet who during his life was in the Surrealist movement, an anarchist and damn good writer.

Murder in Memoriam, by Didier Daeninckx (1984). Another recipient of the Grand Prix de littérature policière, this novel features the laconic Inspector Cadin, who attempts to solve the puzzling double murder of a father and son. The trail of clues he must follow leads to the World War II German occupation of France and links to the Algerian war. An incredible book, one that should be read by everyone who's ever been critical of France. That's just my 2 centimes.

Rough Trade, by Dominique Manotti (2001). A Paris correspondent recommended this to me. I still can't believe a woman wrote this hard-boiled, sometimes hard to take but fast-moving crime tale set in the Sentier. Thank God, I'd written Murder in the Sentier first. Immigrants, cops on the take, heroin and a bisexual police inspector--but that's just the tip of the Sentier, as they say. Dominique who writes dark and gritty in real life is sweet, devoted to her husband and makes a mean 'clafoutis'!

Salamander, by J. Robert Janes (1994). This book (part of a series) features Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Suréte and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo, paired during the German Occupation of France and dispatched to catch an arsonist in Lyon. The riveting descriptions, wartime flavor and historical accuracy of daily life during World War II have no comparison.

Three to Kill, by Jean-Patrick Manchette (2002). Kind of mesmerizing, like a good Goddard film. You don't know why you watch, but you can't stop. With classic thriller elements and twists and wonderful style, Manchette is also a master social critic. City Lights has published a few more of his novels...he died young. Read them!

A Very Long Engagement, by Sebastian Japrisot (1993). In 1917, five French soldiers were court-martialed for self-inflicted wounds and pushed, their hands bound, into "No-Man's Land." The youngest of the condemned men was the fiancé of Mathilde, only daughter of a rich industrialist, who sets out to discover what really happened to him. And decades later, as we see in this intriguing "mystery," she succeeds. But there' more to it than that.

The Zig Zag Man, by Marvin Albert (1991). A tad dated, but Albert knows France and those narrow cobbled alleys, the system, and the ins and outs of French police procedure. I found these at a bookstore and maybe they're on ABE but he writes great tales. Why doesn't he write more?
Cara - Tuesday PS Do you have any French mysteries I should know about?

Chico Xavier

2012-02-06T00:01:00.001-05:00

This was Chico Xavier, a Spiritist who claimed to be able to communicate with the dead.

And, around here, that claim is generally accepted.

So much so, that the Brazilian government even issued a stamp in his honor:

There have been, over the course of the last half-century or so, countless books and magazine and newspaper articles about him, even a feature film.

Check out the sheer volume of stuff on Google and YouTube. It’s impressive.

But I daresay few of you, reading these lines, have ever heard of him.

Because his fame never traveled far beyond the borders of Brazil.

Chico was born, a little over a hundred years ago, in a small town in the State of Minas Gerais. His mother died when he was five, but he alleged that she materialized for him after her death. And, he also alleged, from an early age, to sense the presence of other spirits and to hear their voices.

While still in elementary school, according to a well-documented account, he produced an essay considered to be far too erudite for a child.

And when his teacher challenged him on it, he went to the blackboard and began to write, and write, and write, spontaneously producing a profound statement on the theme.

One, he contended, had been dictated to him, by a spirit, as he wrote.

This became the first public manifestation of what later became his stock-in-trade: psychography, writing “automatically” without apparent awareness or premeditation.

In his lifetime, with this technique, and with only a limited grade-school education, he produced 413 books, some of them in languages in which he was not fluent.

Including English.

And always, as he claimed, with his hand guided by spirits.

He died on the day Brazil won the World Cup in 2002, having earlier remarked that he’d like to breathe his last “on a day of national celebration” so his “passing would not bring sorrow”.

And there are those that think he planned it that way.

His work led to the establishment of Kardecist Spiritism as one of the religions professed in Brazil.

Unfamiliar with Allan Kardec? You can learn more about him by following this link:

http://www.samsara-fr.com/kardec-uk.htm

The words that flowed from Chico Xavier’s pen took the form of religious tracts, novels, even works of philosophy.

And they were translated into Spanish, French, Japanese, Esperanto and English.

Up to now, an estimated 50 million copies of them have been sold.

And all of the profits, all of them, have been channeled into charity work.

Xavier never kept a centavo for himself. And he never tried to take the credit for any of his work. Each and every one of his books bears the line “dictated by the spirit of–” on the title page.

He lived on into his nineties, was made an honorary citizen of many cities and towns all across Brazil and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Tens of thousands of people attest that he enabled them to communicate with their deceased loved ones, and that he was able to tell them things he could not possibly have known about both the living and the dead.

He did most of his work in Uberaba, a small town in the State of Minas Gerais

And is buried there.

This is his tomb. It’s always full of flowers.

Leighton - Monday

Going Dutch

2012-02-05T01:30:00.000-05:00

Okay, last week's topic was suicide, and for this week I promised something lighter. So here we are: teenage sex.

I seem to be in global comparison mode lately, seeking out indexes that rank countries in various ways. Global indexes are blunt-force data and, as such, present an irresistible temptation to do some baseless hypothesizing, which I did quite a bit of with the suicide tables. Ideally, data should lead us to conclusions, but there are people who approach data with their conclusions already drawn, like gunfighters waiting in ambush.

I'm one of those people.

Here's some data.

Percentage of Dutch teenagers between 15 and 17 whose parents allow them to have their steady girlfriend or boyfriend spend the night with them: 72%. (This excludes Muslim households.)

Percentage of American teenagers between 15 and 17 whose parents allow them to have their steady, etc.: approximately 16%.

And, you may ask, so what?

The "so what" is (are) more data, some of it (them) pretty startling.

The teen pregnancy rates for the Netherlands: 11.8 per thousand. For the U.S., it's 72.8 per thousand, or more than six times as high

The teen birth rate for the Netherlands is 4.8 per thousand. In the U.S., 42.5 per thousand or nine times higher.

The teen abortion rate for the Netherlands is 7.8 per thousand. For America, 19.8, or nearly three times higher.

The HIV rate for the Netherlands (in the general population) stands at 0.2%. In the U.S., it's 0.6%, or three times as high. I admit that this is a dicey statistic, given the various modes of HIV transmission.

But this isn't. The ratio of gonorrhea infection among American teens is thirty-three times higher than it is among their Dutch counterparts.

The teen Chlamydia infection ratio is nineteen times higher here than in the Netherlands.

And on and on and on.

So here's the point toward which I'm bending all this data. Those Dutch parents who are okay with sweetheart sleep-overs reveal an attitude toward sex that is more accepting, more natural, less censorious, and less Puritan than that of most of their American counterpoints.

Puritanism is a blight on the American psyche. The apparently unending reverberations of our Puritan and fundamentalist heritage have warped the national character to the point where our horrific attitudes about sex -- attitudes that literally baffle most of the rest of the world -- endanger our children. They've mandated the banning of great books and the creation of the most insane censorship code ever imposed on the motion-picture industry, resulting -- I think -- in the glorification of violence because sex was taboo. They lead us to vote for brainless pencilnecked peckerwoods whose only qualification for public office is that they keep it zipped and pledge to distort the entire science curriculum to bar apes from the family tree.

I was in Asia -- Thailand, China, and Japan -- during the Lewinsky incident, and people kept asking me what the fuss was about. In their eyes, America was close to overthrowing one of the world's most charismatic and effective leaders because -- well, because he was a man. Mirabile dictu -- think of that. A man. And, of course, as we learned later, much to the laughter of Asia, many of those who were leading the witch-hunt (Newt Gingrich among them) were similarly sinful. Little hypocrisy there? Of course, if America were sane on the subject of sex, the hypocrisy would have been unnecessary.

Puritanism is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism encourages knee-jerk reactions and discourages rational responses - although, if I believed a Supreme Being gave us the power of reason, I would also believe that implicit in the gift of reason would be the obligation to use it.

I know this has crossed the border into rant territory, but those statistics make it clear (to me) that Puritanical attitudes toward sex are physically endangering tens of thousands of young people every year -- not to mention the emotional damage. I also know that this is a classic example of whistling in the wind.

It's not much lighter than last week's post, either. Next week, I promise.

Tim -- Sunday

A Film Master Dies in the Manner of His Vision

2012-02-04T00:05:00.070-05:00

Last week an article in The New York Times caught my eye. It was the obituary for Theodoros Angelopoulos. If you’ve heard of him you’re likely one of two sorts: a true film buff or Greek. And for those of you who think when you hear “Greek films” of Never on Sunday (not his, Jules Dassin was the director), Zorba the Greek (uhh, uhh, Mihalis Kakogiannis directed that one), or heaven forbid, Mama Mia, listen up.

Theo Angelopoulos ranked by many critics among the late 20^th Century’s greatest filmmakers, but not all critics adored him, for he was the antithesis of Hollywood style. His were moody art-house films, characterized by long, slow, silent shots and atmospheric, at times dreamlike enigmatic sequences. In one film of three hours he used only 80 shots.

Myth and epic were his tools of symbolism, and much of his work provided allegorical illumination of the painful history of Greeks from Nazi occupation through their brutal civil war. He was likened to filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Michalangelo Antonioni, and worked with stars such as Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Bruno Ganz, and Jeanne Moreau.

Irene Jacob, Angelopoulos, Willem Dafoe

Angelopoulos won a fistful of awards in his four-decade career, including the first prize Palme d’Or at Cannes for his film, Eternity and a Day (1998). That one starred Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as a famous writer left with only a few days to live setting out on a journey in search of answers to vast metaphysical questions.

Winning First Prize at Cannes

But Angelopoulos was perhaps best remembered at Cannes for his behavior three years earlier in connection with his film, Ulysses Gaze, starring Harvey Keitel. It won Cannes’ International Critics’ prize and was named European Film of the Year, but Angelopoulos had come there to win Cannes’ first prize. At the awards ceremony when his name was announced it was for the Grand Jury Prize—second place. For several seconds he remained in his seat, clearly enraged, and when he finally did step onto the stage it was to say, “I planned my speech for the Palme d’Or, but if this is what you have to give me I have nothing to say.”

He was born in Athens in 1935, studied law but found it dull and moved to Paris, ostensibly to study at the Sorbonne but spent most of his time at the Cinémathèque Française. He returned to Greece and worked as a newspaper film critic before turning to filmmaking. Angelopoulos directed more than twenty films and earned fifty industry awards.

I met him casually once or twice, and so I was drawn to the article when I saw his name. But what caught my attention and stays with me was how he died and what he was working on at the time.

Angelopoulos died in Athens’ port city of Piraeus while shooting his latest film, The Other Sea. News reports said the film was about immigration, the crisis in contemporary Greece, and the responsibility of the political class. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Those precise subjects had consumed the last two years of my life, for they are the backbone of my new Andreas Kaldis mystery coming out in June (Target: Tinos).

Then I read how he died. It was not from illness. He was struck crossing a street in Piraeus by a motorcycle driven by an off-duty police officer. There is no more dangerous activity in Athens than crossing a busy street, and nothing wilder on earth than Greek motorcyclists. Yet, neither police nor government does what is necessary to make the roads and crossings safer. And, yes, I’ll take the mail on that.

Perhaps they put their faith in the ancient gods to protect the citizenry or upon some perceived innate deterrent effect of laws that send an offending driver to prison for any death caused by a traffic accident. One can seriously debate that legal approach—there are a lot of hit and runs in Greece—and one cannot help but wonder what will happen in this case where the driver was a police officer.

At least one Greek news source reported the accident as follows: “The accident occurred when Angelopoulos, 76, attempted to cross a busy road without wearing a special reflective uniform.”

A special reflective uniform. I’m sure that’s an item every Greek carries at the ready for those times a busy road must be crossed.

Angelopoulos actually died a few hours after the accident, in a hospital’s intensive care unit. It took 35 to 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive at the scene, because the first two ambulances dispatched to the scene had mechanical problems. A representative of the paramedics union blamed it all on “personnel shortages and poor maintenance.”

Chilling, isn’t it, how one who spent his life immersed in capturing the essence of his countrymen’s tragic past died in a manner symbolic of what threatens it now—a system unwilling to accept responsibility for what all know must be done and quick to blame others for the inevitable results.

Anapafsou en eirini, Theo Angelopoulos (April 17, 1935-January 24, 2012).

Jeff—Saturday

Without Honour

2012-02-03T05:58:00.000-05:00

Much ado in the UK this week about banking. First, the news that the CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which had to be taken into public ownership to save it from tanking during the Fall, was due to be awarded a £1m bonus for, er, well actually no one seemed to be sure what the bonus was for as RBS was hardly doing well. Understandably the public reaction was rather negative. Eventually, under much pressure, the CEO said he would forego the bonus, with much the same grace as my eight-year-old hands over the controls of the Wii to his sister when I tell him it's time for her go.

Then, tumultuous news that a former CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Fred Goodwin, was to become a mere mister. The honours forfeiture committee - and one can only wonder how you get to sit on that - decided that, because of his role in the crash, Goodwin, who was knighted in 2004 for his services to the banking industry, should have his honour removed. The committee said:

[We] are clear that the failure of RBS played an important role in the financial crisis of 2008/9 which, together with other macroeconomic factors, triggered the worst recession in the UK since the Second World War and imposed significant direct costs on British taxpayers and businesses. Fred Goodwin was the dominant decision-maker at RBS at the time. In reaching this decision, it was recognised that widespread concern about Fred Goodwin's decisions meant that the retention of a knighthood for 'services to banking' could not be sustained.

Great, you might think, especially if, like me, you believe the criminal, indecent greed of our bankers led directly to the economic armageddon facing us. It's good that they're finally getting their comeuppance, even if it's purely symbolic. Isn't it?

I have to say the whole thing left me cold. It smacks of the worst kind of scapegoat-ism. Fred Goodwin was already public enemy number one, reviled in the press for the massive pension he received (£16m), given an obligatory daft nickname (Fred the Shred), and revealed as an adulterer (for some reason that escapes most people a rich ex-banker having an affair was deemed to be big news).

Goodwin is clearly overpaid, incompetent and may well not be a very nice person. The bank that employed him did spectacularly badly under his charge. Yet surely these charges can be levelled at almost every person of financial seniority during the last decade? How are we going to punish them? Or is it right that Goodwin becomes the sole repository for all our ill-will and anger, a sort of banking Aunt Sally? Half the banking sector of Britain has an honour of some sort. Will they all be stripped of them? And while we're at it, there's a fair few Lords sitting in the House of Lords with criminal records, even the odd jail sentence in their past. Dear old Jeffery Archer (Lord Archer of Plagiarism) did jail time for perjury, and yet he gets to pass and ratify laws.

Which brings me on to the real reason the whole synthetic episode leaves me cold. The existence of a very silly, feudal honours system in the first place. What sort of place hands out gongs and knighthoods in the first place? They were original given by Kings to curry favour and loyalty among his subjects in more medieval times. Nothing has changed. Inevitably they're handed out by whichever party is in power to the cronies who helped them get elected - in other words, if you donated billions of pounds, you get a nice peerage or a knighthood in return. They are entirely bought. Yes, a few CBEs and OBEs are handed out to sportsmen and women and actors for kicking a ball well or dressing up and pretending, and the odd worthy bauble goes to a member of the public who has done good things, but it's all a farce, and an abomination in a forward thinking, progressive country.

If removing Goodwin's knighthood leads to a more grown-up, meritorious attitude to reward, a serious rethinking of how our banking sector operates, and the eventual abolition of the honours system then it might have been a good thing. Until then it seems pointless and showy.

cheers

Dan - Friday

Not Black Enough

2012-02-02T12:00:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that this is a bit of a rant.

I want to say up front that I’m in favor of affirmative action – at least in South Africa. Take any country which has minority races, minority language speakers, minority religious believers, and you’re going to find some sort of discrimination which will spill over into jobs. Even a country with one race, one religion and one language will still likely have an unfair distribution of wealth and senior positions between men and women. South Africa in the apartheid days, however, was one of the few countries where the discrimination was against the majority of the population and was institutionalized in laws and structures. In that context, it does seem fair that some real effort be made to address the imbalances and spread the opportunities more widely across the people.

But there are problems. Discrimination in the old regime had extended to schools also, and few black children had received decent primary or secondary education. Several local Universities (including Wits University) attempted to bridge this gap in various ways, and the results were positive, but not universally successful. So, in the early stages, many people were appointed to jobs for which they were inadequately skilled. This led to the conventional wisdom among whites that “these people are not capable of handling theses jobs”. (This is patently untrue, and "these people" is, of course, a euphemism.) Worse, it sometimes convinced the holders of the jobs that they were inadequate. Things have improved on that front, and people appointed to jobs now are usually appropriately trained or at worst able to cope. The reality is that seventeen years of more equal education has taken place. I say more equal because the school system is still very variable. Now it is a question of what you can pay and where you live rather than what color you are. The majority of the country’s people are not able to pay very much or move to a good area.

Unfortunately it is young white men who are taking much of the pain of affirmative action. While older people may be losing hoped for promotions, they are seldom losing their jobs. (Not for affirmative action reasons in any case.) But the economy is weak – like everywhere else – so there is now a scarcity of jobs. Even skilled white university leavers – accountants, scientists and engineers, for example – are finding the job market tough. But they are getting offers from other places like Australia and New Zealand, and we will miss them when (?) the economy turns around.

Lindiwe Mazibuko

Well, no pain no gain etcetera. But now we come to the rant. The question now is if you are black enough. All women were regarded as discriminated against in the early stages, but soon white women were declared not disadvantaged enough. Then people of Indian and mixed race descent were not black enough. (You can argue the white women case – after all they benefited from apartheid too. That certainly can’t be said for the other two groups.)

Patrica de Lille, Helen Zille, Lindiwe Mazibuko

Even when someone is black in the black African sense, that may not be black enough. Allow me to introduce Lindiwe Mazibuko. This young lady is smart and talented and the parliamentary leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) – the official opposition, and only group able to make any real challenge to the ANC government. While the DA was the rump of historically white parties – albeit liberal – and appealed to that segment of the population, it was treated by the ANC government as a minor nuisance, unavoidable in the democratic scheme of things. When its white leadership accused government members or civil servants of corruption, this was dismissed as white racism. (No, I don’t see that connection either.)

Ms Mazibuko is an affirmative action appointment. She has risen rapidly, and is strongly supported by the party’s feisty leader - Helen Zille. She beat a more experienced white male for the parliamentary leader’s job. The party understands that it will never achieve a breakthrough with middle class – let alone average - black voters unless it transforms itself. Last week Ms Mazibuko made the New York Times. You can read the article about her here.

But the idea of the opposition reaching out to blacks is altogether not to the ANC government’s liking. So, then, is Ms Mazibuko black enough? She was born in Swaziland and came to South Africa as a child. So is her iZulu-speaking black enough? Then her ideas. She says she used to vote for the ANC when she was younger but feels they have failed the “born frees” - children born after the change of government - and she is disgusted by the corruption. This is not the language of true blacks (i.e. supporters of the ANC). So Lindiwe Mazibuko is dismissed as a ‘coconut’ – black outside but white inside. Definitely not black enough.

There is so much that’s good in South Africa and exceptional. But the ANC government is going to have to learn that – in the long run – they can’t rely on every black African’s support as a given. And they need to start addressing that with appropriate policies rather than with derogatory language.

Michael – Thursday.

Memories for sale

2012-02-01T14:40:00.001-05:00

I am presently in Florida on a trip with my husband, teenage daughter, five year old grandson and a sweet niece of twelve. We are in Orlando where the magic is supposed to happen and the purpose of the visit was to visit the parks for the kids, do some shopping and relax. So far we have been to a mall or two and to Disneyland, our grandson‘s and first visit to this park as well as my niece‘s, while my daughter is more jaded and me and my husband could work as tourguides atfer a lifetime of such visits.

Disney is expensive, they do not give away the tickets even though now three of their main attractions are under repair and many of the buildings are hid behind canvas painted to look like what they did before, hiding what is probably refurbishment. Closing up for a period of such work is probably not an option so we remained understanding while trying to explain to our grandson what was going on after he pointed out one such house and exclaimed that it was a cartoon. We managed to keep our cool upon exiting one ride after another into strategically placed gift shops where pirate swords and laser guns from outer space were pointed in the direction of our grandson. Even when we were completely ripped off buying a 50 dollar photograph of the kids's heads placed into a Star Wars background.

We have Seaworld and Universal to go and it will be interesting to see if our calm reserve remains intact to the end. I am not so worried about Seaworld since animals do not awake the same annoyance as grown-ups dressed as rodents with big white glove-clad hands. But Universal I worry a bit about, it will be our last park and there instead of the rodents we will have grown-ups dressed as superheroes. The only similar figure I like is the Lego edition of Darth Vader. It makes you wonder if there might possibly be an evil race on a planet far away where all the evil guys are tiny like the Lego figure. It would completely ruin their evilness.

But I think we will be OK. Bring on the superheros. You see, we have been through the ringer and managed not to scream or lose it completely.

Ususally when we travel we stay in regular hotels. But this time around we needed something bigger and did not feel comfortable in taking two rooms because of the kids ages, so we booked at a resort. This we did through Travelocity and while booking there was nothing to suggest anything out of the ordinary. Turns out this is some sort of timeshare hoohah. Regarding such dealings, being from Iceland we are complete babes in the woods. There is no such thing as timeshare at home and the only mention we had heard about this was from a relative of my husband‘s who inherited two such slots from her brother who had lived in the States for a time and has now spent years desperately trying to get rid of them. Last I heard she was thinking of faking her own death.

A call from the lobby asking us if we would like a tour of the resort for an hour and a half in exchange for discounted park tickets sounded like a wonderful idea to us. Little did we know. We lost five hours of our vacation watching a stupid advertisment about the founder of this resort and how no one can take away your memories, walking into model apartments and being pretty agressively pushed into signing up for something that was such a ridiculously bad deal that you have to give them some credit for even trying.

The tactic was boiler room – first someone sweet with a crazy offer that only the drunk and otherwise thought impared would fall for, then a tall guy in a suit that joins the table and has a very special offer that just came in. When this does not work yet another with something less expensive and a new round of figures involving points, weeks and dollars. And the deal had to be signed that morning, no going home to mull it over, no google-ing or getting outside advice. How fishy can you get? When we asked why the put this pressure on people they said it was the law of Florida, they had to do it this way because of legislation. If we did not make a deal that same hour they would not be allowed to meet with us for two years. We must have looked particularly stupid. All other questions were answered akin to this: Question: „How do you get ut of this if you don‘t want to own a timeshare anymore?“ My husband‘s cousin buying fake blood made us think of this. Answer: „Why would you want to stop having vacations? Do you foresee in your future that you will want to stop enjoying life?“ Oh please.

For the two bedroom apartment they wanted us to finance for them, we were to recieve 200 000 points. These we could use at the resort or change over to hotels in other locations. When we asked how many nights this would get us for example in NYC it turned out we could stay 2.5 nights. Great deal right? To say nothing of the financing they offered. Sixteen point nine percent interest. Highway robbery. I am upset at myself for not standing up and yelling to all that were huddled around on the other tables to think about this figure. Makes me almost want to go back, just to throw that wrench into the cog. But the law of Florida prohibits me from doing so. Maybe in two years time.

But what was most amazing was the fact that five hours passed and that we did not walk out at any point. I have no explanation for this other than these people knew what they were doing and we did not. We were also too busy refusing to sign and pointing out that as soon as we knew what was going on we let them know we were not looking to buy anything off them. And then there is upbringing, you do not want to be rude. So we are now the proud owners, not of a timeshare but five hours of bad memories. Just the opposite of what they kept promoting as if they had the franchise of remembrance.

No one needs a resort or a timeshare to obtain cherised memories. My favorite one from this trip so far is my grandson asking us if the voice on the GPS was reciting news. He hates news.

Yrsa - Wednesday

Poor in Paris? Visit your tante

2012-01-30T23:17:00.000-05:00

This may look like a bank but it's a pawnbroker used by the poor in Paris. My friend sent me an article from good business which is in English and clearly explains this peculiarly French version of going to the pawnbroker or visiting your 'tante'. So I'm using a lot of the article because for me it finally cleared up this confusion I've felt about this 'tante'. Researching a book several years ago, Laura my editor suggested I look up a man who used Bayonne's Crédit municipal bank - pawnbroker - to embezzle huge funds which resulted in a scandal and exploded in December 1933. The embezzler Alexandre Stavisky, known as le beau Sasha - the handsome Sasha - was linked to several government deputies in a complicated scheme and some say this brought the Daladier government down.
He later 'committed' suicide.
This week, thousands of lucky French people had their financial obligations forgiven after the country's oldest bank decided to simply wipe their slate clean. The 3,500 clients who benefitted from the bank’s largesse had debts of 150 euros or less - about $190 - with the Crédit Municipal de Paris, also known as the "Mont-de-piété," the bank of the poor, which has for centuries allowed the needy to get loans against their valuables—an ethical pawnshop, or the original microlender.
Celebrities of the past secretly used the bank: Victor Hugo, Claude Monet and Napoleon’s first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais,
among others. Prince François d'Orléans, third son of King Louis-Philippe, once pawned his watch to settle a gambling debt. Ashamed when asked what happened to his precious timepiece, he answered, "I left it at my aunt's' ma tante'.To this day, getting help from 'ma tante' is a discrete way of saying one's been going to the "poor people's bank."
The unexpected gift is a way for the bank to celebrate its 375th anniversary. The Crédit Municipal de Paris was created in 1637 by Théophraste Renaudot, a doctor, journalist and philanthropist who wanted to combat poverty by giving the needy access to fair banking. Interest rates at the time could go up to 130 percent. The doctor's idea was to give the poor people of Paris loans they could reasonably hope to repay, at decent rates for the time (about 10 percent annually) against whatever collateral they could produce: pots and pans, linens, silverware, artisans' tools. Records show a 19th-century woman so destitute her only possession was her mattress. Every morning, she would carry it to the bank and pawn it. With that money, she'd buy potatoes, sell them for a profit during the day and buy back her mattress at night.
Today, the bank stores more than a million objects, from the small piece of jewelry to the grand masterpiece, in headquarters covering a city block in the historical center of Paris. With a capitalization of 60 million euros, the bank had 93 million euros in pawn-broking loans outstanding in 2010. Its 2010 profit of 1.3 million euros was partly assigned to improving shelters for the homeless. Similar city-owned, not-for-profit banks opened all over the country ie. Bayonne which Stavisky took advantage of, on the same principle: Pawn an object and you get a yearlong loan. Pay off the interest - 4 to 8.9 percent annually- and you can extend the loan; pay off the principal and you get your property back. If your valuable is sold for more than you owe, the profit is yours. These banks were eventually granted a state monopoly on pawn-broking loans, which continues to this day; France is thus a country without pawnshops."People were never very proud to go to the Mont-de-piété," says an official. It may be why people turned away from it: With the prosperity of the 20th century, people wanted to forget this symbol of poverty. But it is no longer forgotten."Our director likes to say our waiting room is like that of a hospital emergency room," the official adds "Everyone comes to it at some point."
Cara - Tuesday

Socrates

2012-01-30T00:01:00.001-05:00

No, this isn’t about the philosopher. I leave that kind of stuff to our Greek expert, Jeff Siger.

My post of today is about this guy:

Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira.

It’s been my privilege to be introduced to some of the greatest stars Brazilian football ever produced, Pele, Rivelino, Jairzinho, Gerson, Tostão, Falcão, Zico, but there was no one quite like Socrates.

We met first on the Lido, in Venice, back in 1983, when he was already a star, and I was still very ignorant about the beautiful game. He was there with a friend of mine. We boarded the same boat to go to the Rialto.

I’d heard of him, of course. In Brazil, Doctor Socrates was already a household name and widely-regarded as one of the greatest midfielders ever to play the game.

He’d been captain of the Brazilian team that played against Italy in the 1982 World Cup, a game of such surpassing skill and spontaneity that no one who saw it will ever forget it.

But I thought Doctor was just a sobriquet.

Not so. That day, in chatting with him, I learned that Socrates actually was a doctor, an orthopedic surgeon. And that he was also a folk singer, an author and a very modest and agreeable man.

Who, surprisingly, didn’t put football first.

The things that concerned him were eliminating poverty and building roads and schools.

And it wasn’t just talk.

In later years, after he retired, he went on to become a political activist. He wrote for newspapers, not only about sport, but also about politics and economics.

Unfortunately, he also became an alcoholic.

The activism was of a kind that could have gotten him killed during the military dictatorship of the 1970’s.

And the alcoholism did kill him.

Take a moment, now, to enjoy the Brazilian Team’s goals in the 1982 World Cup, from the days when Socrates was in his prime:

(C’mon, watch the video. Please! It’s a part of my continuing campaign to generate interest in the sport among you non-football fans. Remember, there’s only a little over two years to go before the event kicks off here in Brazil.)

Socrates died last month at the age of 56, just one day before his old team, Corinthians, won the Brazilian championship for the fifth time.

He was a doctor. He knew what the endless cigarettes and caiprinhas he was so fond of had done to his health.

Nevertheless, on the night he died, he went to a restaurant with a group of friends and overloaded his liver with the same degree of serenity that his namesake displayed when he drank the hemlock.

He was a most extraordinary man.

And Brazil is missing him.

Leighton - Monday

Quality of Life?

2012-01-29T00:49:00.002-05:00

Among the many, many things that irritate me about The Huffington Post is the fact that it insists on finding new ways to tell us which countries offer the best "quality of life."

Why does this irritate me? First, because it's stupid. I know people who would be happy anywhere, and people who couldn't have a good time if someone handed them a lamp with a genie in it. And let's face it: for a statistically significant number of people, what's desirable is simply what they don't have. Even when you get beyond those for whom a "better quality of life" would mean something as simple as "enough to eat," there's still the ever-present discontent with what's at hand. Many Swedes, for example, would like to live somewhere with palm trees, and lots of Peruvians would probably like to try a few hours at sea level.

Second, the winner always seems to be Liechtenstein or some other off-brand country you need spellcheck for, some place with mountains. Mountains are good for falling past, good for collecting (ughhh) snow in the winter, good for passes that funnel icy winds down on perfectly nice people, good for yodeling and lederhosen and goats. But to live with? Please.

All these intangibles aside, it seems to me that one index of how much people in a given country actually enjoy their quality of life might be how often they end it by their own hand. It's hard to come by statistics about what percentage of people living somewhere wished they lived somewhere else. Hard to identify a threshold - does a mild longing qualify? A frequent flip through National Geographic? The occasional semi-erotic daydream?

Suicide, on the other hand, has a clear threshold. So I asked myself, which countries have the highest and the lowest suicide rates? Surely those with the highest incidence of citizens offing themselves have to acknowledge a certain malaise. This being the age of the Internet, here's what I learned.

The nation with the highest suicide rate in the world (in 2010) was South Korea. (Numbers are not available for North Korea.) This is generally attributed to the rapid rate of economic and social change in Korea and the personal and professional pressures South Koreans impose upon themselves. Alcohol use, which is pretty liberal, may also be a contributing factor.

Twelve of the twenty countries with the highest suicide rates -- Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Hungary, Russia, Latvia, Slovenia Ukraine, Serbia/Montenegro, Croatia, and Moldova -- were previously members of the Worker's Paradise of the Soviet Union. So that's yet another reason to be thankful to Communism; it left behind an environment to which death is preferable. Can there still be anyone who feels that Soviet-style Communism was a good thing? As Orwell recognized way back in 1945, some pigs were much more equal than others.

Japan, where suicide is, so to speak, a way of life, is seventh. (By the way, seventh place translates into 23.8 suicides per 100,000 people.) Temperature seems to be a relevant factor; Guyana and Sri Lanka are the only tropical countries in the top 20, and, in fact, colder countries--sorry, Yrsa--generally seem to have more suicides. (A lot of them have mountains, too.) This phenomenon is especially striking in view of the fact that all five of the countries with point zero (.0) suicides in the most recent reporting year are in, or on, the Caribbean.

Surprises? Some countries I tend to think of as miserable -- Iran, for example -- are pretty low on the index. The United States, at number 41, has fewer suicides than Switzerland, France, Austria, Sweden, Canada (!), Portugal, and Norway, but more than Australia, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, to name a few.

Across the board, no matter where they are, men are much more likely to kill themselves than women -- often ten times more likely, more usually four to five times. (The sole country in which there were more female than male suicides is Sao Tome/Principe in western Central Africa, but the numbers are so low it may be a one-year anomaly.) Beyond Sao Tome/Principe, the exceptions are rare: the numbers are almost even in Tajikistan; three quarters as many women as men kill themselves in India; more than half as many women as men in Kuwait, Singapore, and the Philippines; and a little less than half as many women in Turkey and Hong Kong, and a few other places.

Among the countries in which the writers on this blog set our books, France, at #21, has the most suicides per capita, all those great pastries notwithstanding. (France probably has the most existentialists of anywhere on the planet, too, and there may be a connection.) Iceland is second, at #38, Land-of-Smiles Thailand is third at 62, the United Kingdom is fourth at number 61, followed by Brazil (70) and Greece (84, and Jeffrey clearly has the right idea).

No numbers are available for Botswana, but South Africa is #23.

I have no idea what any of this proves and would be thrilled to get some suggestions. It's one of those topics that seems interesting on the face of it, but when you get down to the final paragraph, there's no conclusion. Yet another reason for me to learn to outline.

Anyway, keep living. You never know when you might meet someone.

Tim -- Sunday

Something lighter next week, I promise.

The Gods Will Be Back

2012-01-28T00:05:00.002-05:00

I long for the day when the mention of Greece will once again first bring to mind ancient gods, epic tales, and a land and sea infused at every inch with the seminal essence of western civilization. Someday that will happen, for financial crises are transient and gods are immortal, though not eternal—after all, they do need nectar and ambrosia to sustain them.

Ahh, yes, the good old days of true Greek gods quick and strong, knowing all things, capable of miraculous achievements.

It’s been a long while since I’ve read up on the ancient gods, and I must admit to often getting them mixed up, but I’ve just learned that my confusion puts me in illustrious company.

Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.)

According to Alexander S. Murray’s Who’s Who in Mythology, even Socrates was confused by the varying number of seemingly same gods (one Aphrodite or two?) and multiple names for one god (Zeus in summer was called Zeus Meilichios, the friendly god, and in winter Zeus Maemaktes, the angry god).

Aphrodite (Bouguereau 1879)

Some think that’s attributable to disparate early Greek tribes who even after coalescing as a single race kept the original names for their separate gods despite obvious similarities to each other (Dione, Hera, Gaea, and Demeter).

Hera with Zeus

But call them what you wish, the essential purpose of the Greek gods was the same: their existence and interactions explained to mortals the natural order of things, e.g., the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the clouds, lightning, thunder, earthquakes, storms, waves, and on and on as needed.

What made Greek gods so significant was that the essentially human form of the Twelve Olympian Deities of Mount Olympus and of the lesser gods living in other environs gave to those who worshipped them the sense that their deities could understand and relate to a mortal’s needs and fears.

The mythological explanations offered by the carryings on of the gods largely centered upon the three supreme rulers of the world: Uranos, Kronos, and Zeus.

The first to rule was Uranos. He represented the heavens and, as the husband of Earth, brought forth life and everything on our planet.

Uranos with Earth

His son, Kronos, ruled next as god of the harvest, ripening and maturing the forms of life brought forth by his father.

Kronos and Rhea

And, lastly, ruled Zeus, bringing order and wisdom to the universe.

Zeus overthrows Kronos (Van Haarlem 1588)

I think it’s safe to say that Zeus hasn’t been around for a while. Or has he?

Whatever, all of this impresses me, as it should every writer, artist, and musician who freely borrows from the tales of the gods in their own creations, albeit sometimes consciously oblivious to the source of their inspiration. So much of what we think unique to modern culture is simply a new way of retelling of what ancient Greeks witnessed in their deities.

I wish I had time now to say more. But there will be later. One must always make time for the gods.

Jeff—Saturday

Left Ear, Right Ear and Too Austere

2012-01-27T09:49:00.000-05:00

I remember the death of Princess Diana. Who can't? A nation entirely took leave of its senses. It was like waking up to find you'd been inculcated into a cult you never knew existed, all that showy grief and those crocodile tears. It was also an excuse for the very canny to exploit. My favourite story is of a pub owner in the North East, who, in the days after Diana's death, put a sign up in the window. It read: 'Due to the tragic death of Princess Diana, and as a mark of respect, Happy Hour will be cancelled this week.'

I see something similar now in these austere times. After years of living it up, we are being told to cut our cloth according to our means. I never really had that much cloth, even in the good times, which is why I walked around financially stark naked, but it's sound advice I suppose. I also have a bit of a problem with all those people urging the banks and the Government to do more for the responsible folk who saved their money. The hard-working savers, and hard-working families. But what about the feckless spenders? Don't we have rights too? We propped up this economy for years, and now we've been dumped, shoddily, callously, like a Gingrich spouse.

What irks me is that some people I know are enjoying this austerity thing a bit too much. The ones who slipped away from the pub before it was their round, or somehow seemed to be in the gents. They bragged about the bargains they found and we all turned our noses up. Look, a Saville Row suit that someone died in for £50!! How we laughed at their parsimony as they wiped the bloodstains from the soiled jacket sleeves. Now everybody's buying second hand clothes, and telling everyone else about it while they're at it, or that they're brewing their own beer at home, or cooking pots of soup and stew at the start of the week and making it last until Thursday. Let's just be clear: any home brew tastes absolutely disgusting, soup is not a meal, it's medicine, and leftover food is awful, unless its curry and only, and I mean ONLY, when eaten for breakfast with a hangover.

Everyone is talking about their budget. Even my sister, a lawyer, (and therefore hardly on the verge of the workhouse - just mentioning her, even without naming her, cost me £200) and a shopaholic who has so many shoes she makes Imelda Marcos look like Gandhi, told me at Christmas that 2012 would see her live within her means. No more than £150 on a single purchase. She'll probably just go and buy the left one the next day.

But there is a serious issue here. Namely, the businesses who will hide behind austerity to cut jobs rather than make a bit less money; and more insidiously, the Governments, like our very own coalition, who will hide behind austerity to slash any number of budgets and benefits that ordinary people rely on to live and survive, in the name of austerity when really the motive is ideological. Only this week the reprehensible lot who run the UK were caught trousers down trying to sneak through welfare cuts, or increase charges, that will only affect the poorest. Single mothers trying to track down errant fathers to pay towards the cost of bringing up their children will be charged for doing so by the Child Support Agency, while the social fund, basically a one-off payment to the truly desperate, usually to tide them over until some administrative hiccup is solved, or until a much needed cheque is paid to them, is to be abolished. Meanwhile, guess what? Huge bonuses are still paid in the city, the rich still manage to avoid paying their fair share of tax (this might have some resonance in the States, eh my old mate Mitt?) and the diabolical Mayor of London, who has spent four years coasting on public cash, still manages to go on two skiing holidays in one month.

So, Happy Hour is officially over. Unless you're rich.

cheers

Dan - Friday

Something from nothing

2012-01-26T08:26:00.000-05:00

As is the case in many Third World countries, most South African families don’t have enough money to give toys to their kids. As would be expected, the kids make their own – usually from stuff that nobody wants.

Ever since I can remember, I have watched kids (usually Black) playing with toys that were far removed from the Lego, Meccano, Lionel trains, and so on that I was privileged to have. When young, my reaction was confused because I didn’t quite grasp the implications of poverty. The older I became, the more I appreciated the creativity of these home-made toys. Today I covet them.

What has happened is that this creativity has spilled over into the general community, which has needed to find ways to make money in times of horrific unemployment. So we are blessed in South Africa by a plethora of arts and crafts made from trash or stuff that no one else wants. My house is filled with them.

Pop cans are a huge resource for the do-it-yourself artist or toy maker. My online research indicates that Americans throw away, not recycle, 1500 cans a second - that's billions a year. Although not as wasteful, South Africans also gets rid of millions. Here is what you can do with them.

Roses – I have this bunch sitting on my desk in my office. Also saves water in this drought-prone land.

Sculpture – I saw this Coca Cola lion in a local shop.

Pictures – incorporating used cans and other leftovers into wall hangings is very popular here. How many brands can you find incorporated?

Tired of boring frames for pictures or mirrors? There is an alternative.

These handbags or purses use old car number plates as decoration.

And these notebooks have Castle lager cans as covers.

Do you need a shopping basket? Here's one made from cardboard, packets, advertising, etc.

Or need to know the time?

One of my favorite styles are baskets made from telephone wires. I wonder why my phone doesn’t work all the time.

A year or so ago, I was wandering around the Winterberg mountains, and I came across a little coop started by a farmer. She sold crafts made by locals, funneling all the money back to the artist. I couldn’t resist this hippo (a kubu) made from mud by a nine year old boy. It was his first sale as an artist.

One of my coffee tables sports half a dozen or so bird sculptures made from seed pods, mud, and wire. I love them.

Very common throughout the country is ‘stuff’ made from wire. It is fascinating to watch an artist sitting on the side of the road start with a long piece of wire, which is slowly bent into something gorgeous, like the baobab tree shown below, which I photographed on my village Knysna's Main Street.

Here is the one I own. I use it to hold the dried proteas picked from my garden.

It didn’t take long for these artists to incorporate beads into their work, and bead pieces are now a separate genre. Look at the detail of this cock.

Anything can be used as subject matter from lizards, to giraffes, to seahorses (the symbol of my village, Knysna).

And all of this is separate from the wonderful wood and soapstone sculptures that are for sale everywhere.

I'm so lucky to live in a place where creativity thrives, producing objects rich in colour and design.

Stan - Thursday

The end of the rainbow - Norway

2012-01-25T18:05:00.005-05:00

I am just back from a trip to Norway. There I visited three cities, Oslo, Stavanger and Bergen, on a mini tour organized by my Norwegian publisher Kagge. The trip included 2 other authors, Swedish Ulrika Davidson who specializes in low carb cooking and Jørn Lier Horst a Norwegian crime fiction writer that just won the bookseller prize in his home country and has now written a crime novel for teenagers. Both were super fun and the trip was very successful in every way. I bought Ulrika’s low carb book which promises a loss of 6 kilos in 6 weeks and am going to put my husband through the wringer. He will need more than one round though, how many I am not telling. I also bought Jørn’s children’s book and am going to read it to learn Norwegian. Although Norwegian and Icelandic are very similar langauages, like my husband I will need more than one round to reach my goal.

Norway is a paradise country. It is beautiful to behold and wealthy in a good way. It is the world’s second richest nation and this is not per capita. It is a net external creditor of debt, meaning they don’t owe – they are owed. I actually did not know that was possible. But Norway’s prosperity stems from them having one of the richest reserves of oil and gas outside the Middle East, endless hydropower, very good fishing grounds and lots of metals. But Norway does not behave like a Kardashian, despite their wealth being pretty a pretty recent development. Not at all. As an example, the profits from the gargantuan oil industry goes into a fund belonging to the nation. No one from their royal family is buying cars made of pure platinum or cleaning out their ears with Q-tips made of cashmere. The money is for the people. And did I mention that the people are great? It sounds too good to be true but it is not.

Well actually there is one snag. Everything in Norway is super expensive. I snuck to a MacDonald’s to have a hamburger without Ulrika seeing me and found out that a quarter pounder costs about almost the same as a bottle of Champagne in other countries. A sweater I liked cost the same there as if it were made of fur here, and so on. So I did not go on a shopping spree, only bought the diet book and the kid’s book. As an author I find it perfectly OK for books to be expensive. Hamburgers no and sweaters no.

There was one last thing that endeared Norway to me, hammered in the admiration actually. I passed through three Norwegian airports: Gardemon in Oslo and the somewhat smaller ones in Bergen and Stavanger. In each one the biggest ads hanging from the ceiling or posted on the walls were not from credit card companies, banks or vodka producers. No, they were ads promoting engineering as an occupation, from firms desperate to show why engineers should take up a job with them, or from recruiting agencies urging engineers to put their careers in their hands. Not that it would take much to operate a successful recruiting agency specializing in engineers in Norway if the shortage is anything to go by. Get one hopeful with a so-so CV in the morning, he’s got a job by lunch. On a slow day.

And this is the country my ancestors left to go to Iceland 1200 years ago. Because they found the king of the time annoying. And they did not even know Iceland existed. They just sailed away. To the north, in the direction of cold. So it is no wonder that the women of Norway did not want to join them.

It has been snowing here for days. Before entering the house in the evening you have to memorize where exactly you left the car in the driveway, as in the morning it will have disappeared. Become one with the plump, thick white carpet that swallows everything immobile. If my ridiculous ancestors had only tried counting to ten when dealing with the irritating monarch, I could be sitting in Bergen cleaning my ears with a cashmere Q-tip while yawning over the job offers piling up. Ah, to be an engineer in Norway.

Wednesday - Yrsa

below Paris

2012-01-23T21:51:00.000-05:00

A few more photos from the file of subterranean Paris -beyond these gates of Parc Monceau, where Marcel Proust walked

lies a whole graveyard of Metro trains under this entrance

during the war a big shelter for the Metro VIP's with air sealed doors was constructed

Cara - Tuesday

Literatura De Cordel

2012-01-23T00:01:00.001-05:00

If you come to visit us in Brazil, you’ll occasionally see a stand where the offerings look like this:

Literatura de Cordel (lit. “cord literature”) derives its name from the way the wares are often displayed, i.e. hung by a cord, usually with the aid of clothespins.

Such stands are less common in the southern part of the country, but are a feature in many of the fairs and markets of the northeast, principally in the States of Pernambuco, Paraiba and Ceará.

These little booklets are the last survivors of a form of popular literature with which an inhabitant of eighteenth-century Madrid, or nineteenth-century England, would have been quite familiar, but that you’d be hard-put to find elsewhere in the modern world. They contain stories and ballads and are generally produced in black-and-white, illustrated with woodcuts.

Down through the years, the content has taken-on a distinctly Brazilian flavor.

Many of the books deal with the folklore, legends and history of the northeast, subjects like Lampião and his band.

I've previously posted about him under the title The Bandit King. And, if you like, you can read that post by clicking on this link:

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2010/01/bandit-king.html

One of the classics of cord literature, The Arrival of Lampião in Hell, by José Pacheco, is much-prized by collectors.

And a satire on the Brazil’s most recent president, The Arrival of Lula in Hell has been enjoying a good deal of success in recent months.

As to the art, two of the more talented woodcutters are Adir Botelho and José Francisco Borges.

This is Botelho:

And this is a work from Borges, who has had expositions at both the Louvre and the Smithsonian:

Leighton - Monday

In the Beginning

2012-01-22T00:43:00.001-05:00

One of the nicest things about having a website is that people write me letters. My personal website, although it's got the usual self-serving promotional nonsense on it, is largely taken up by a section called FINISH YOUR NOVEL, in which I try to tell people some of the things I've learned through years of failing and trying again.

So a lot of my mail comes from aspiring writers. A few days back I got a long letter from a 16-year-old high school girl, who pretty much made my jaw drop. Among other things, she said:

" . . . I recently started developing my latest idea for a novel. With my previous ideas, I had never fully explored the idea and ended up letting it sit until I found myself saying "When am I going to start that novel again?" Of course, when that would occur I ended up spitting out a few more random bursts of ideas and that was that. The cycle repeated itself.

"So now I'm to the point where I feel idle in my life - I'm going nowhere and have no general direction I want to go in. It's quite annoying, actually. A high school junior striving for success to take her into unknown territory - her future. But despite the stresses of getting into a good college and everything that may entail, I find myself coming back to the yearning to write a book. Often I ask myself, "So when are you going to actually sit down and write?"

She says that in her other artistic endeavors, "What takes me the longest is starting the piece. Staring at a blank canvas is a lot like staring at a blank sheet of paper, in my opinion. I'm at peace while working, but starting is insanely difficult, especially when I don't have direction."

So, okay, she's extraordinary, and I should probably be asking her for advice rather than giving it to her. But she asked. And here's part of what I wrote back:

The first thing I'd suggest is that you decide what kind of book you like best, and choose that form. If you've read a lot of thrillers or YA or steampunk or dystopian books or historical novels or whatever, you have an intrinsic sense of how they work, how they're structured. That's a big head start.

I'm going to give you two pieces of similar advice from somewhat disparate sources and then one more piece of advice that says the same thing, but from the perspective of a novelist -- actually, my favorite living novelist.

First, from the German writer Goethe: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Beginnings have genius, power, and magic in them."

Second, from Jacques Copeau, one of the leading figures of 20th-century classical theater (this quotation actually inspired Laurence Olivier to stop worrying about getting more training and just start acting): "There is only one way to begin to do a thing, and that is to do it."

You can see where these are leading. Third is an excerpt I read two weeks ago in my favorite novel of the year, Haruki Murakami's "1Q84."

The character is a young writer who's been given an opportunity to ghost-edit a manuscript by a 17-year-old girl that has a peculiar power but is abysmally written. And he needs desperately to get started.

"He had no well-defined plan for the rewrite, no consistent methods or guidelines he had prepared, just a few detailed ideas for certain sections. . . . But events had already started moving, and he had a limited amount of time. He couldn't just sit there, thinking, arms folded. All he could do was deal with one small, concrete problem after another. Perhaps, as he worked on each detail by hand, an overall image would take shape spontaneously."

This is as good a description of the writing process as I've ever read. Writing is like laying stepping-stones over a void: each scene, each idea, makes the pathway a little longer, and eventually something begins to sort of shimmer at you in the distance, and that'll be the real nature of your novel. We learn what we're writing about by writing about it, and then we go back and either tidy up the beginning or rewrite it entirely. But whether that beginning is ever seen by a reader or not, it was an absolutely essential part of writing the book.

So what I'd suggest is setting a totally arbitrary schedule. Give yourself a month or so to figure out what kind of book you want to write, and then think of a character, or two, or three, and a situation that might lend itself to that kind of book. In a wonderful recent documentary on Woody Allen, the interviewer asked where Allen's ideas came from, and Allen said he has ideas all the time and he writes them on any old piece of paper and puts them in a suitcase so he can rifle through them whenever he needs a subject. Then he pulled out a few and read them aloud. One of them was, "A man inherits the equipment of a great magician."

That was it. No and then he, no and his friends say, not even, but. Just that sentence. Remember, in the section of my site that you read, my most basic definition of a novel: "A novel is the story of someone who . . ."

So get your sentence and create a folder on your hard drive and start to write. You can throw ideas into if for a while if you like, but pretty quickly, if I were you, I'd dive in with an opening sentence that engages your imagination: "She always remembered which night it happened because of the lunar eclipse . . ." and keep going.

And keep going and keep going.

When you get into trouble, remember that we all get into trouble, every single time we do this. And remember also that your book isn't going to be perfect, so don't stop for imperfections. Make them stronger later. The French poet Paul Valery said, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." This is equally true of novels. Get through the story the best you can.

Then you can write your second novel.

Tim -- Sunday

Guest Author: Anne Zouroudi

2012-01-21T00:05:00.002-05:00

It is my distinct honor to present as our guest blogger my colleague in Greek arms, the distinguished novelist Anne Zouroudi. Anne brings a gifted lyrical voice to the mystery genre, and to say that her detective, Hermes Diaktoros aka The Fat Man, is a magical protagonist tells only part of the tale.

Anne was born in the north of England, and after a business career that included a stint on Wall Street, she moved to the Greek islands, where she married and lived for some years. Anne now lives in the Derbyshire Peak District but her attachment to Greece remains strong, and the country is the inspiration for much of her writing. She is the author of the Mysteries of the Greek Detective, each based on one of the Seven Deadly Sins: “The Messenger of Athens” (shortlisted for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award 2008 for Breakthrough Authors and longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize), “The Taint of Midas,” “The Doctor of Thessaly” and “The Lady of Sorrows,” shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Awards in 2010. Her most recent published novel is the sixth in the series, “The Whispers of Nemesis.” Book seven, “The Bull of Mithros,” will be published by Bloomsbury in June 2012. Anne’s website and blog are at www.annezouroudi.com

Welcome, my friend.

It’s not everyone who’d relish an enforced stint in the Greek army. Certainly I wouldn’t—the very idea of bunk beds and reveille, parade grounds and bossy, unsmiling men barking orders (orders? I don’t take orders) makes me shudder, and the indignities of communal showers and latrines would have me AWOL within hours.

But my son, it seems, is quite looking forward to it. Which is just as well, since at the end of this month, he’ll have his head shaved, be kitted out with khakis and heavy boots, and enter the Basic Training programme for National Service recruits at the barracks in Nafplio, a couple of hours drive from Athens on the Argolic Gulf.

He’s proud to be joining a fighting force with over 4000 years of history—a once-legendary army commanded by Alexander the Great and Achilles. Sadly, at this low-point in Greece’s fortunes, the army is feeling its share of the pain. With the military budget slashed, basic training has been cut from two months to two weeks; there are rumours there’s no ammunition for recruits’ firearms training, and few weapons for them to fire if the ammo were there.

A few months ago, I was invited to Athens by my Greek publisher. It was a memorable trip, not least of all because I was interviewed live, in Greek, on national television (Yes, it was terrifying. My Greek’s not bad, but it’s not up to that standard, not even close. But the gods were feeling kind, and somehow I got away with it). A book-signing was scheduled in one of the city’s huge bookstores, a splendid five-storey palace of reading overlooking Syntagma Square. The event went well, questions were asked and answered. We said our goodbyes, and my publisher led me out onto the square.

Revolution was brewing there. Tens of thousands of people were gathering to protest the latest Draconian measures the government was proposing (Draco was himself an Athenian, in around 600BC; his punishment for debtors was slavery). Athenian Greeks are highly political, and will readily strike, demonstrate or protest to make their point. But this was different. The atmosphere was calm, but touched with danger; these were people right at the end of their ropes, and had little to lose.

The Athenians I met on that occasion were close to despair. Knowing they were Europe’s whipping boys, each felt the disgrace personally; humiliated by the screw-ups of their leaders, they felt shame in their failure to thrive in what had seemed the Brave New World of the Euro. Like an army defeated, they were on their knees, and it was tragic to see them brought so low.

But Greece has been down before, and she’ll pick herself up. She’ll pick herself up, because at the heart of every Greek is a Zorba-like outlook on life which makes them flourish.

I recall a journey by taxi, on the island of Kefalonia—a beautiful island with glorious beaches. The taxi-driver was a genial soul called Manos; he offered his congratulations that we had mastered some of his language, and took our understanding as his cue to talk at length about his life.

“Look,” he said. “If the taxi business goes well, or if it goes badly, what do I care? I have a piece of land with a few olive trees, and every year I make my oil. I have my garden and my vegetables, I have a few chickens and I grow a few grapes to make a glass of wine. I have my beautiful wife, and my beautiful children, and we’re all healthy. What more does a man need?”

A wise man, indeed, and fairly typical, in my experience, of an attitude bred in that land of milk and honey. Greeks out in the islands will, I feel, weather Greece’s current economic storm much better than city dwellers, because they have the resources for subsistence close at hand. In the islands, you can still gather snails after the rain, and make a stew; you can pick wild greens, catch a fish, keep a few chickens or rabbits in the backyard, and many people do so. In many ways, the remoter islands especially have changed very little since Homer was a boy, and since the gods were bestowing gifts and wreaking havoc.

But what of those gods now, in Greece’s hour of need? Have they deserted the mountains and meadows, abandoned the rivers and the seas?

Let me end with a quote from the Messenger of Athens, where old Nikos is trying to persuade his niece out of an affair.

“There are no gods,” said Irini.

“Why so certain? Look.” Nikos gestured towards the hillsides, and at the open sea. “This is their terrain. They’re not far away. Some say when the people stopped believing in them, they ceased to exist. But this view’s still what it was when Jason built the Argo and the Minotaur was eating virgins in the labyrinth. Two thousand years, and nothing’s changed; and don’t think they’ve gone! Orthodoxy is just a facade, a veneer. If you look around, really look” – he pointed to the centre of his forehead – “using this eye, then you start to see. They’re here, and they’re watching.”

And taking a great interest in Greece’s fortunes, have no doubt...

Efharisto para poli, Anne.

Jeff—Saturday

Born or Taught?

2012-01-20T07:24:00.001-05:00

What do you think of creative writing? Or at least the teaching of it? Can people be taught the craft of creating convincing character, constructing plot, writing vividly and passionately? Many think so. After all, despite the troubles the publishing industry faces, creative writing courses, in the UK at least, are oversubscribed. Or perhaps it's because of those troubles; after all, it has never been easier to make a book available to the public. Yesterday I downloaded the new IBooks Author app. It came with a free damaged liver. I was crestfallen to learn you still had to supply the text. What are Apple playing at?

There has been a bit of a brouhaha about creative writing courses over here in the UK recently. A very important and prestigious writer and critic - or at least that's what he sees when he looks in the mirror - called Philip Hensher attacked the plethora of courses and said that academic institutions "will always prefer the second-rate and self-limited writer to the dangerous maverick." You don't need to be Freud to realise that Hensher sees himself as having a foot, clad in a brightly coloured sock to prove how really crazy he is, firmly placed in the maverick camp.

Giles Foden, another very important and prestigious etc, who is professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where the first UK graduate creative writing course was founded 40 years ago, hit back in suitably bitchy style. Hensher, he claimed, wanted his job and lost out to him after interview and is therefore bitter. UEA has just produced a collection of work written by its alumni, edited by Foden, and features stories from the likes of Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. The point of it being, 'Look how many great authors we've produced.'

But that's the UEA course, and even then only around 20 of the 300 or so who have taken the course could be counted as household names, according to Hensher. Many more have been published. But that still leaves the majority who never have been. There are hundreds of other creative writing courses now. Most of those who attend will never be published. Does that mean they have failed? Are they eaten up by anguish and regret? Or are they thankful for the experience? Do these courses still offer the talented writer a route to the book shops (or the route to the Amazon online store)?

I'm not sure. I know several writers who teach on some of these courses. Most enjoy it. It gets them out from behind their desk and into a room full of people, whose enthusiasm for and appreciation of literature energises them. There is great satisfaction, I've been told, in helping a student formalise their thoughts, structure their story and produce a convincing piece of fiction. Many of them tell me that they encounter some fabulous writers, who start the course hesitant and self-conscious, but then grow more confident and assured as it progresses. It is for that reason, they say, the courses are worthwhile.

But that also means, and these friends confirm it, there are those who are probably wasting their time. But rarely are they told this. Their presence means funds. In this climate, it's a rare and bold academic institution that will turn down cash.

For what it's worth, I think there's some merit in these courses. But only for those with a bit of life experience. I'm talking about those who have always wanted to write but have worked in other jobs, or raised kids, but are teeming with ideas and just need some guidance to turn those ideas into a sellable work of literature. I'm less convinced in the merit of taking teenagers straight from school and breeding them for a life in literature. They would be much better off getting a 'proper' job, living a bit, better still living alot, writing for their own pleasure, and then producing some work when they or it is ready, and attending a course if they need to. (But still keep the proper job. It's a bloody snakepit out there.)

And if I needed any proof to back up these thoughts, then I would need to look no further than two of my fellow blogmates, Stan and Michael, whose Edgar nomination for Death of a Mantis - richly deserved - proves the adage that age and experience beats youth and a terrible haircut any day of the week, and that a wine gets better as it matures (and that when it does, Stan and Mike are likely to drink it...)

Well done chaps!

cheers

Dan - Friday

Leonardo Pisano Bigollo

2012-01-19T11:03:00.001-05:00

It's very unlikely that you’ve heard of Leonardo Pisano Bigollo; I hadn’t until I started looked for some background information for this blog. He was born in 1170 and died some 80 years later, he was an intellectual friend of Emperor Fredrick II, and he is regarded as perhaps the greatest western mathematician of the middle ages. He also made an enormous contribution to western culture by recognizing and popularizing a concept that changed the way we deal with numbers to an extent equivalent to what computers have meant in our era.

But he is remembered today because he gave his name (or at least one of his names) to one of the most intriguing mathematical phenomena in nature. Part of the name problem is that he seemed to go under a variety of names – frowned upon nowadays! – but in the intellectual world he was often referred to as Leonardo Fibonacci or, most usually, just Fibonacci.

Statue of Fibonacci in Pisa

Fibonacci’s great contribution was that he recognized the value of the Hindu-Arabic number system, and popularized it in the west through a book Liber Abaci. At that time the Roman number system was in use. We still find it quaint to use it on clocks or at the end of movies to code the year, but imagine doing arithmetic in it. XII + XII = ? Easy rules enable us to work out 12 + 12 but how would you go about doing the Roman calculation? (No cheating by converting any of the Roman characters to Hindu-Arabic numerals.) And after you’ve worked that out you might like to try XII x XII = ? The only odd thing is that it took more than six hundred years from the invention of the Hindu-Arabic system for someone to get the point in the west. Of course, communication was very different in the twelfth century, and no doubt there was a bit of prejudice about foreign ideas. (Not everything’s changed in the last 800 years.)

Fibonacci did some really deep research of his own in number theory in an era where there were few established mathematical tools. But he's remembered today for a particular sequence of numbers which is now called the Fibonacci sequence, although it too goes back to the Hindu mathematicians. Fibonacci was interested in the numbers because of an idealized rabbit breeding problem. (I’m not going to go into that here – idealized rabbit breeding sounds like an oxymoron to me.) This is how the sequence works.

Fibonacci Chimney by Mario Merz

Each number in the sequence is obtained by adding the previous two numbers together. The first two numbers are 1 and 1. Thus the third number is 1+1=2. The fourth number is 1+2 = 3. The fifth is 2+3 = 5, the next 3+5 = 8, then 13, 21, 34 and so on. The first few terms of the sequence are displayed on the chimney of Turku Energia in Turku, Finland, in two meter high neon lights.

Fibonacci's Dream by MartinaSchettina

What is fascinating about the Fibonacci numbers is that they occur in all sorts of surprising places in nature. They lead to particularly attractive spiral curves, they predict the way leaves and flower petals are arranged. And those spirals are clearly visible in the seed heads of sunflowers and many others. The arrangement of plant primordia in this way even has a name - phyllotaxis.

A Fibonacci Spiral
Each square's side
is a Fibonacci number

They seem to have an almost mystical fascination. That's how they arose originally in connection with Sanskrit prosody. There is a formula which allows one to calculate the numbers, and it involves the Golden Ratio beloved of the ancient Greeks for the design of temples. For some reason there is a feeling of perfect proportion about this ratio. When we see it in art or architecture we immediately feel a satisfaction with the proportions. Where does that come from? Take a look at the Parthenon below.

Modern artists use the numbers themselves, and they made a bit appearance in The Da Vinci Code. There is a journal published quarterly devoted specifically to their properties and applications. Half an hour with Google shows that they are used to argue everything from numerological conspiracies to the existence of God.

However, their ubiquitous occurrence in nature turns out to be a nod in Darwin’s direction. The arrangement of leaves in this particular spiral allows the best average exposure to sunlight. The Fibonacci spirals of the sunflower seed head can be shown to be the best way of packing seeds that are generated at the center and then move outwards. Here’s a link to a YouTube simulation which shows how the process might work. Sunflower

So Fibonacci will be remembered forever, albeit maybe for the wrong reason. Not bad for a mess of rabbits.

Michael – Thursday.

PS Stanley and I just learned that our book DEATH OF THE MANTIS has been shortlisted for the Edgar Award for best paperback original. We're absolutely thrilled and just want to thank all our friends and readers out there for all your enthusiasm, encouragement and support.

M&S